Here's Looking at You Page 7

  But then, if Eva could abandon a husband, he guessed a cat was small beer.

  The doorbell sounded. James tried to greet Eva with an expression that wasn’t set into cement-like hostility, but wasn’t a fake smile either.

  He didn’t know how Eva could still do this to him – three years now since they first met – but every time he saw her, he was struck by how breathtaking she was in the flesh. It was as if the full impact of her beauty simply had to be seen to be believed. It was a physical sensation as much as an intellectual appreciation of proportion and symmetry.

  That heart-shaped face, and generous mouth that he’d initially thought might be too wide, and seconds later, realised was the best mouth he’d ever seen. Her slanted eyes, dimples and her hair; naturally dazzling Timotei white-blonde.

  If she wanted something and turned on the charm, she’d let her hair fall across her face, then delicately pick a strand between forefinger and thumb and draw it back carefully across her ear while keeping her gaze fixed on you, lips slightly apart.

  Early on in their courtship, James thought she had no idea how madly seductive this was. Then, on a mini-break, they’d inadvertently landed themselves with a gigantic restaurant bill in Paris. The prices were already set at dialysis levels and they’d bungled the conversion to sterling with the wine list. James had nearly fainted at the final figure.

  ‘I’ll explain,’ Eva said, summoning the head waiter, speaking in halting pidgin French – even though she was fluent – and using that look, while James watched his then-girlfriend’s machinations in awe.

  With pinwheel eyes, this man, a snobby Parisian no less, had fallen into a trance and for no reason other than he was being asked to, agreed to halve the cost of a dusty bottle of Château D’Oh My Christ I Missed the Last Zero.

  If Eva hadn’t been an art teacher, then hostage negotiator or shampoo model could’ve been equally plausible options.

  Standing at the door now, she looked daisy-fresh, sylph-like and about twenty-five in a dove-grey belted cape coat and skinny indigo jeans. Resentful as he was, James ached, just ached, for her to say ‘What on earth was that all about? I’m such an idiot!’ – and fall back into his arms.

  ‘Hi. Are you about to go out?’

  James looked down at his clothes, forgetting what he’d put on.

  ‘Oh, no. Well, yeah. Once you’re gone.’

  ‘You can leave me alone in here, James, I’m not going to steal your DVD player. Is that a beard? Is it staying?’

  James’s hand went to his chin. ‘Maybe. Why?’

  He was ready to be snappish about this – it’s no longer any of your business – but he’d already lost her attention.

  ‘Oooh! Hello you!’

  Great. Wild excitement at seeing a sullen in-bred feline, after a greeting with her husband that could be measured with a spirit level.

  Eva danced round James to the spot where Luther was hovering on the stairs, picking him up and nuzzling his blankly uncomprehending, angry-looking face.

  ‘Aw! How’s my best happy hair baby?’

  James was starting to really hate the happy hair baby. ‘Happy’? How could you tell, when you’re dealing with something that looked like a tubby dictator in a mohair onesie?

  ‘And how’ve you been?’ she asked, as an afterthought.

  He hated Eva asking this. She knew full well the honest answer was more than his pride could take, and the alternatives let her off the hook.

  ‘Same. You?’

  ‘Good, thanks. This year’s intake seem a cute bunch. They really behave for me.’

  ‘No doubt.’

  Eva worked at a redbrick private school in Bayswater and her miraculous crowd control was not unconnected to her aesthetic appeal.

  Every so often, she’d come home with some smitten pupil’s unsubtle daubing of a full-lipped blonde, possibly floating Ophelia-like in water. It was usually a stealthy excuse to paint Miss in the scud. James had been irritated at being expected to look at this febrile fan-fic pinned to the fridge door.

  ‘Here are the ear drops for Luther,’ she dumped her bag on the table and rummaged for the packet. ‘Twice a day and some brownish discharge is normal.’

  ‘Fantastic. Looking forward.’

  ‘I’m going to get some more clothes from the spare room.’

  ‘Knock yourself out.’

  ‘There’s no need to speak in such a … diminishing way, all the time.’

  James rolled his eyes.

  Eva stalked upstairs and Luther padded off to the kitchen, with a flick of his tail to express his disgust at James’s inability to keep a woman.

  After she had rifled through it for the ear drops, Eva’s tan shoulder bag gaped open enticingly in front of him. James could see a folded piece of paper and made out a name, ‘Finn Hutchinson, 2013’ with multiple kisses. Pupils were painting her this early in the term? He peered more closely. If he acted like a jealous spurned lover, that’s because he was one.

  Listening to her moving about on the floor above, James pulled the drawing out. It was textured, thick cartridge paper, the sort you get in art supply shops.

  He unfolded it and stared at a charcoal outline of his naked wife, legs hooked over the arm of a sofa, arms thrown back, staring at him unrepentantly from heavy lidded eyes, hair pooled in serpents behind her head.

  This could, of course, be another Eva tribute. Nevertheless, something told James this had been sketched from real life, notably the accuracy of the detail.

  For as long as he’d known her, Eva had favoured a bikini wax that left only a vertical, cigar-shaped strip of hair. The small smudgy line between the thighs was a sure sign that the artist was gifted with first-hand knowledge. The smoking gun pubes.

  James left the portrait unfolded on the table and leaned against the wall, breathed out, and folded his arms.

  Feeling nauseous, deathly cold and yet in control, he measured each minute she remained upstairs as an eternity.

  15

  When Eva walked in, James took savage pleasure in the moment of grisly silence as she pieced the scene together.

  ‘You went through my things?!’ she blurted. There it was. If any doubt remained that this was a memento from her new man, her reaction sealed it.

  ‘You left your bag open. What is it?’ James asked, dully.

  ‘It’s a drawing. You’ve seen them before.’

  ‘You’re going to lie to me? Even in the face of this?’

  ‘How am I lying?’

  ‘Because this isn’t from anyone’s imagination, Eva, it’s you. Do you think I can’t recognise my own wife?’

  A pause. Her face dropped, her shoulders heaved and she started to weep. Frustratingly, James felt automatic guilt at making her cry. He knew he was being manipulated and his fury broke.

  ‘No, don’t cry! You don’t get to cry. You’ve done this to me, to us! How the fuck do you think I feel? Do you think I deserve to find out you’re having an affair via a doodle of your tits?’

  ‘I’m not having an affair!’ she said, blearily.

  ‘What word would you prefer?’

  ‘I knew you’d make this about Finn when it’s not.’

  ‘Oh I think it’s a bit about Finn now you’re shagging him, don’t you? How long has it been going on?’

  When they first split, he’d asked her if there was anyone else and it was no, no, no – absolutely not.

  Eva shook her head. ‘Nothing happened until we’d separated.’

  ‘Hah. Right. You obviously finished things to start this. Thanks for the Bill Clinton definition of honesty.’

  Eva shook her head vigorously. ‘No.’

  ‘Is that too straightforward for you? Does trashing our marriage have to be about higher, spiritual needs than you being into someone else? That would be so ordinary, wouldn’t it? And make you in the wrong. Heaven forbid we call it something as shitty as you CHEATING.’

  James had built up to shouting and Eva was wiping at her cheeks,
head bent, hair falling forward over her eyes. It wasn’t remorse, it was a tactic to make James the villain of the piece and he wasn’t having it.

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘He did some life class modelling. We’ve become closer recently …’

  ‘How close? This close?’ James gestured with his hands apart. ‘Or let me guess. This close,’ he put his palms together.

  Eva shook her head and sniffled.

  Wait. Finn. Life modelling. She’d talked about him. She’d met him at a launch, with her restaurant PR friend, Hatty. He’d offered to model for her students and she’d said they couldn’t afford him.

  Then a few weeks later there’d been a giggly, supposedly disparaging tale about how this ‘Abercrombie & Fitch type’ had swaggered into school to pose, dropping his robe and flirting with the blushing A-level students.

  James remembered saying, ‘What, flirted while flopped out? I have to admire his confidence.’

  Eva had demurred with talk of strategically placed towels, and said something about how he was an up-and-coming who was signed with a major modelling agency.

  James realised now that cocky Finn had made rather a big gesture in working pro bono.

  Eva had gaily wondered which of her sixth formers might have a fling with him. James now detected the sleight of hand, with hindsight: it was Eva he’d met, before he posed. It was a gesture to impress her.

  ‘How old is he, Eva?’

  ‘Twenty-three.’

  James put a hand over his forehead. ‘Twenty-three? What the—? You’re into kids now? Harold and Maude?’

  ‘Oh that’s right, start running him down and making your James jokes. Let’s not discuss this in a mature way.’

  ‘How do you expect me to behave? Did you think I’d be calm and reasonable in the face of finding out you’re sleeping with someone else?’

  He nearly said how would you feel if the situation was reversed, then realised that question might not do him any favours.

  She shook her head in a patronising way, as if it was James who had something to be ashamed of.

  It was at this point that Luther decided to interrupt, the treacherous scruff-sack making distressed yowling sounds at Eva’s feet. She scooped him up and made extravagantly soothing noises, as if it was James breaking up happy homes and cat’s hearts.

  ‘I’m not having sex with him,’ Eva said, without much conviction, over Luther’s giant feather duster of a squirrelly tail.

  He shook his head in disbelief.

  ‘Put that thing down, will you.’

  Eva bent and dropped him.

  ‘We meet for coffee. I’ve only been to his flat once. To pose for him. He’s interested in art.’

  ‘What the …? I’m supposed to believe that you then put your thong back on and shared Muller Corners? And by the way, tell him not to give up the day job. You look like Richard Branson in that sketch.’

  ‘Posing is not a big deal for me. That’s a British hang-up, sexualising nudity.’

  ‘And Finn’s Scandinavian is he? No? British and male and heterosexual? Ah right. So you’re telling me nothing happened after that?’

  ‘Not … I told you.’

  Her hesitation about how to categorise their activities was worse for James than an outright confession of Biblical knowledge. She might as well take a knife, slice a flap in his stomach, and tuck in with a chilled spoon.

  ‘If you’ve done things with him that would get you arrested if you did them in public, Eva, you’re sleeping with him. Sorry to be so old-fashioned. It’s just with me being your husband, I get terribly hung up on the detail.’

  There was a pause where Eva didn’t demur.

  ‘Is it serious?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘All this for “I don’t know.”’ James put his hands on his head. ‘I’d prefer it if you said yeah, he’s the love of my life, it had to be done.’

  He wouldn’t. James was picturing this Finn’s eyes, hands and possibly tongue on Eva and trying not to cry, vomit or punch a wall.

  ‘Maybe your inability to comprehend that this isn’t about someone else is the kind of attitude that put a distance between us.’

  ‘What the fuck’s that meant to mean?’

  ‘It means that the fact I could feel anything for Finn shows something wasn’t right with us.’

  James swallowed hard. His Adam’s apple had apparently swollen. ‘I think you’ve got this back to front,’ he said, struggling to keep his voice even. ‘The whole point of being married is you resist the temptation of other people.’

  Eva picked up her bag, eyes downcast.

  ‘Since we got married, things haven’t been the same. More routine, perhaps. I can’t explain it.’

  ‘There will be some routine in a marriage, that’s how it works. We have a home, and jobs.’

  Eva looked at him contemptuously, as if to say is that it? That’s all you got?

  ‘Am I supposed to wait this out, while you decide if you’re gone for good or not?’ James said, though with less fire than before.

  ‘I’m not asking you to do anything, James.’

  She was composed now, contrition over. That was Eva. Maddening, supremely self-assured Eva, who he was inconveniently hopelessly in love with.

  James had no idea what more to say, or what to do. Any threats were bluffing. When someone took a shit on your heart like this, they either lost you, or discovered they had all the power.

  ‘When you’ve calmed down, we can talk.’ She let herself out, and left James slumped on the sofa.

  Was it true? Had he trapped Eva like a schoolboy with a butterfly in a jam jar, and watched her wither? No, bollocks to that. Eva was no fluttering helpless creature, and North London had plenty of oxygen.

  She’d spoken as if their life together was something he’d designed, and sealed her inside. They both wanted this, didn’t they? Looking at the house, it was Eva-ish in every detail, bar his PlayStation 4.

  But he was boring. Life with him was boring. How did you fix that? How did you make your essence interesting to someone again? He did want to fix it.

  Whilst he hated Eva right now, and she was making him utterly miserable, he felt more addicted to her than ever.

  When James was eight and his parents had sat him down and told him they were separating, he’d not understood why his dad couldn’t be around for some of the time. Surely to go from living together to nothing at all made no sense? Stay for weekends, he’d said. Or Wednesdays. Wednesdays were good, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was on and they had pasta bow-ties with the red sauce.

  They’d both smiled sadly and indulgently. Now here he was with his own marriage falling apart, and although he now understood why they couldn’t be saved by scaling back their hours, he wasn’t sure he understood them any better either.

  And yet again, Eva hadn’t mentioned the ‘D’ word. Knowing her, she’d probably stick it on a text. ‘Got Luther something 4 his tickly cough. PS Decree Nisi on way 2 U.’

  James tried to push the bad thought away, the worst thought, even worse than her being scuttled by some idiot with a Smurf hat and no belt in his jeans. If she does come back, how are you ever going to feel sure of her again?

  He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, Luther was in front of him on the rug, staring at James with an accusatory menace, breathing like Darth Vader.

  ‘C’mere, you grumpy git.’

  James picked the cat up and held him to his face, letting his thick fur absorb the tears as he sobbed. Luther smelt of her perfume.

  16

  When she was eight years old, on a trip to see the Italian family, Anna’s dad had taken her to see the Ravenna mosaics. While her mother, with a trainee consumerist in Aggy, had done the rounds of the boutiques, Anna was stood with cricked neck in the saintly hush of the Basilica of San Vitale. Her father told a sketchy outline of the story of Byzantine Emperor Justinian and his consort Theodora.

  It was enough to get her hooked.
She was utterly lost in the story of the daughter of the bear-keeper of Constantinople’s hippodrome who became an actress, prostitute – her dad had gone with ‘she made money from her adventures’ but Anna wasn’t stupid – and Empress of the Roman Empire. She stared at the regal beauty depicted in those tiny glittering tiles and felt as if those lamp-like dark eyes were staring directly into her own, communicating across the distance of centuries.

  It was as close as she might come to a religious experience; the sense of finding something you were looking for, being transformed in a moment. Anna’s family weren’t religious, but in some ways, Theodora became a deity for Anna. Here was an inspirational woman who’d travelled very far from her beginnings, who demonstrated that the start point need not define you. She was a heroine, a role model. Well, there had been some fairly wild activity in the process of making a name for herself, involving all the orifices, and Anna wasn’t going to try that. But in general.

  Her parents had tried to slake her newfound thirst for knowledge by buying her one of those hardback A Brief History of All the History There’s Ever Been books, with lots of pictures. She devoured it in days and wanted more. Eventually her mum let her have free run of a library card and Anna was able to get to the good stuff, proper detailed lurid biography.

  Books showed Anna other universes, promising her there was a big world beyond Rise Park. It might not be overstating it to say books saved her life. She never understood why some of her friends thought history was dry and dusty. Young Theodora was getting up to shit a sight more colourful in AD 500 than any of them in the twentieth century, whatever Jennifer Pritchard was claiming went on in Mayesbrook Park.

  Some went into teaching because they loved imparting knowledge, or more often, bossing people about. Once Anna overcame her fear of standing up in front of an audience – through therapy and practice, and in the early days, a gin miniature – Anna enjoyed lectures and tutorials well enough. But for her the raw thrills were in research.